ANALYSIS OF RIGHT VENTRICULAR REMODELING USING CURVATURE HISTOGRAM COMPARISON

Keywords

Abstract

Understanding and quantifying right ventricular (RV)
remodeling in repaired Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) is
crucial for patient management and therapy planning, i.e.,
in determining the optimal time for pulmonary valve
replacement. However, quantification of RV remodeling
is usually hampered by its complex geometry. This paper
presents a computer-aided cardiac assessment
methodology to quantitate RV remodeling in terms of a
histogram similarity index, based on the surface curvature
distribution of three-dimensional (3D) RV geometries at
both the end-diastole and end-systole phases. These 3D
RV geometries are reconstructed from border delineated
cardiac MRI images, whereby a surface fitting algorithm
is then used to calculate the curvature distribution of the
3D models. The curvature histograms at ED and ES are
computed and their similarities are measured using the
Bhattacharya Similarity Metric, which is denoted as hdist.
Based on an initial study involving 5 TOF patients and 5
normal subjects, we observed that the mean hdist for the
normal controls is significantly higher (p = 0.0015 < 0.05
and p = 0.004 < 0.05; student t-test and Mann-Whitney-
Wilcoxon test, respectively) as compared to that of the
TOF patients. This suggests that hdist can be used as a
discriminant between TOF patients and normal control.